Tag Archives: graduate school

I’m at that point where it’s time to take the notes and outlines I’ve generated for my dissertation and start putting readable text on paper. I should be psyched, but I’m terrified. It’s like jumping off a cliff using a bungee cord made of dental floss.

Up until now, my dissertation has existed only in my own head, and as long it stays there, it can remain the platonic ideal of everything I want it to be. But once I actualize it, it’ll never live up to that ideal. It will only be as good as my own shortcomings as a researcher and writer allow. The longer I delay putting words on paper, the longer I can avoid the dismay of realizing how far short of the ideal it’ll fall.

That’s always been the single greatest obstacle to my productivity. The same fear of actualizing a project plagues me whenever I try to write something. After I finished my master’s thesis, I could’ve turned it into a couple of scholarly articles in a matter of months, since the research and writing was more or less done. But it literally took me years to send one of the chapters off for publication. It didn’t take years to do the revisions, mind you, but to muster up the gumption to sit down and see it through. I had the same experience trying to turn a seminar paper into an article draft this past summer…and again this past week, while trying to figure out how to articulate this dilemma for the blog post you’re now reading. A good third of the posts I start to write for this blog end up in the trash bin for that same reason.

Lyman C. Draper, via Wikimedia Commons

This is one reason I’ve always felt a kind of kinship with nineteenth-century antiquarian Lyman Draper. Like me, Draper was fascinated by the early frontier. Also like me, he had a special affinity for the King’s Mountain; the only book he saw through to publication was a history of the battle. He accumulated enough material, however, to write a shelf full of books on pioneers and frontier battles. In fact, he conceived a number of book-length projects over the years: biographies of Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark, a volume of “border forays,” collected sketches of prominent frontiersmen, and so on.

But he couldn’t bring any of them to completion. Even the one book he managed to get published was plagued by delays. Draper set out to write his King’s Mountain study at the instigation of colleagues who wanted him to get it out in time for the battle’s centennial. He missed it by a year, in spite of his publisher’s incessant pleas to hurry things along. He just couldn’t stop tweaking, double-checking, and accumulating more and more data.

Historians have attributed Draper’s lack of publications to a number of factors. First and foremost, he was a collector and aggregator, happiest when he was transcribing manuscripts and interviewing pioneers and their descendants. He was also an obsessive fact-checker who insisted on verifying every obscure scrap of local tradition he came across. Finally, he had a streak of hypochondria a mile wide, and his repeated bouts with illnesses both real and imaginary interrupted his workflow.

But I think part of the problem was simple anxiety of the same sort that paralyzes me when I try to write out a piece of research. The problem wasn’t that Draper had a poor work ethic. He approached the task of chronicling frontier history with an almost religious zeal. And I suspect it was that very zeal that helped do him in. He knew he was sitting on a goldmine of material, and I think he feared that when he set pen to paper the results wouldn’t do his sources justice. It was easier to go on collecting, and to let the platonic ideal of his book projects live on in his head and in his notes, where they could remain unsullied. And, to be honest, Draper was a much better aggregator than a writer; his King’s Mountain book is more valuable for the material contained therein than as a work of historical literature.

Draper is one of my personal heroes, but he also serves as something of a cautionary tale. For as long as I can remember—for much longer than I’ve wanted to be a historian, in fact—I’ve wanted to find things out and then write books about them. But I’ve idealized the process of research and writing to such an extent that actually doing it paralyzes me to the point of inaction.

Being in grad school has helped, since I’m accountable to people who don’t hesitate to kick me in the pants when I’m not generating drafts. And I feel better knowing I have access to professional mentors who can critique my work before I send it off for publication. Once they tell me it’s up to snuff, I can let go of some of my own nagging feelings that it’s inadequate.

They say a pretty good project that’s completed is better than an outstanding one left undone. And as far as one’s CV is concerned, I’m sure that’s true. The hard part is internalizing that fact enough to put it into action.

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be engaged in some archival work this summer, thanks to the generosity of a couple of funding sources. The David Library of the American Revolution has awarded me a residential fellowship, so I’ll be headed up to Pennsylvania soon to pore over their incredible microfilm collection. (Hope I can muster the discipline to get my research done while being in striking distance of so many Rev War sites.)

I was also fortunate to receive an Archie K. Davis Fellowship from the North Caroliniana Society, which will give me an opportunity to examine Revolutionary War records in the Old North State. I’m very grateful to both the DLAR and the NCS for these research funds; I wouldn’t be able to access materials critical to my dissertation without this support.

Oh, and if you’d like to read a short description of my project and look over my CV, you can now do so at the UT Department of History’s website.

Well, I took my written comps a week ago and passed my orals today. All I have to do now is write that dissertation, defend it, get a job, make full professor, retire, and die.

This is going to sound weird, but I think I’m more relieved right now than I will be when I actually finish my degree. I mean, I’ve spent a long time learning to grapple with other historians’ work, basically listening in on the conversations that scholars have been having. Passing comps means you’ve listened in long enough and you’re ready to join a conversation yourself, or perhaps even start your own.

Heck, I get to spend the next few semesters getting paid to do original research on a topic that fascinates me. How awesome will that be?

My first order of business, though, is some leisure reading. I’ve got a waist-high stack of books I’ve been yearning to dig into for months. Rev War books, dinosaur books, religion books, narrative history…all the stuff I love to read but haven’t had much time for lately. I’ve even compiled a bucket list of classic comics and graphic novels that I’m going to get started on; there are two volumes of post-Crisis Superman stories headed my way as we speak. I’ve always wanted to read straight through Herodotus and Thucydides, too, so maybe I can knock out one of those over the holiday break. Might even be able to squeeze in a couple of those thrillers Crichton wrote under a pseudonym.

I’ll get to all that, just as soon as I take a nice, long nap. Or two.

A few days ago #firstsevenjobs was a trending topic on Twitter. It prompted an interesting conversation among some historians about the diverse paths people have pursued before grad school, and the pros and cons of entering a graduate program later in life vs. the “traditional” route of going straight through from college to Ph.D.

This is actually a subject on which I can speak with a certain degree of authority, because I’ve experienced grad school as both a traditional student in my early twenties and as an older student hitting the books again after a hiatus. I was more or less fresh out of college (but for a year’s employment) when I did my M.A., but I worked in public history and picked up adjunct gigs for a while before heading back for my Ph.D. Granted, I’m not that much older than a “traditional” graduate student, but I’m not exactly a spring chicken, either. My baseline movie version of Batman is still Michael Keaton.

So which was harder, being a younger or older grad student in history? Personally, I’ve found the Ph.D. experience to be less stressful, even though I’ve had a higher class load as a doctoral student than I ever did while working on my M.A. And the decisive factor has been the time I had to simmer after finishing my master’s degree. I’ve read more, I’ve thought about my interests more, and I have a much better idea about how to integrate those interests into the historiography and contextualize them than I did in my early twenties. It’s made a world of difference.

I’ve also had more time to develop my skills as a communicator and writer. Practice is everything when it comes to sharpening your prose, and being older means you’ve had more time to practice.

Some people say that you don’t have as much capacity to do coursework and absorb information after you get older, but my experience has been the opposite. A graduate education in history isn’t really about learning new “facts.” What counts is breadth, depth, and maturity of thinking, not how many terms you can memorize in a night of cramming. It’s a form of learning that favors perspective more than plasticity.

Now, all this comes with two important caveats. First, I’m an older student, but I’m also a bachelor. That means I can’t speak to the difficulty of balancing grad school with family responsibilities, which would be an issue a lot of older grad students have to deal with.

Second, the age difference between my younger classmates and I isn’t substantial enough to be generational, so the issue of being so much older than my peers that I have nothing in common with them is not something I’ve had to deal with. But I can say that there are a few students in my department who are old enough to have adult children, and age differences haven’t kept any of us from becoming a very close-knit group. The common experience of going through the program more or less overrides whatever distinctions of age, background, and religion we have.

The upshot is that if you ask me if it’s hard going back for a terminal degree after ten, fifteen, or twenty years out of the classroom, I’d say this: Grad school is tough on anybody, but the nature of the historical discipline is such that being long in the tooth can actually give you a bit of an edge.

All this is assuming, of course, that you’ve put some of those years out of the classroom to good use. Your age in and of itself is less important than your mastery of content, the perceptiveness of your conclusions, and the willingness to work hard. And that’s true whether you’re a retiree or Doogie Howser.

The final assignment in my Native American seminar was to develop an undergraduate syllabus for a course on some aspect of Indian history. I decided to design my class around early American history, since it’s what I’m most familiar with.

I felt pretty confident going into this project. Having spent several years doing adjunct gigs before going to back to grad school, I’d designed my share of syllabi. And since I’ve done a fair amount of reading on colonial America and the early frontier, I knew of quite a few Indian-related books that I could assign. As you might imagine, though, it turned out to be quite a bit harder than I expected.

In fact, there was a sense in which my background was actually a handicap, because it had predisposed me to think about early American history in particular ways. As I’ve mentioned before, we tend to conceptualize the history of early America in simplistic terms of geographical and temporal progression. You’ve got your Spaniards in Latin America at first, then your French around Canada and the Mississippi Valley, and then it’s Anglos moving from east to west from there on out. Once the English get settled in at Jamestown, there’s a tendency to ignore everything west of the eastern seaboard until more colonists start pushing into the interior. For too many of us, vast swaths of America don’t really have a “history” until Anglophone settlers show up.

If you’re trying to frame history from a Native American perspective, this simply won’t do. Indian societies had been rising, falling, and coalescing across the continent for centuries before white settlements appeared in North America. And over the course of the many decades it took Anglophone settlers to make their way to the Appalachians, the Mississippi, the Rockies, and the West Coast, history wasn’t at a standstill. Native people in what we vaguely think of as “the West” had been encountering, trading with, fighting against, and living alongside Spanish and French settlers (and each other) during all that time.

I’m ashamed to admit that I forgot all this when I started picking readings for my syllabus. My first slate of assigned books all dealt with Indian-colonist relations in the eastern U.S. It didn’t occur to me to break out of that mindset until my professor gently reminded me that I was ignoring a good two-thirds of the continent. Oops.

Periodization also proved trickier than I anticipated. I knew that I didn’t want to cover all of Native American history down to the present, but every cutoff date seemed to present difficulties. I thought about stopping with removal, but that sort of implies that Indians were no longer around or ceased to be a factor in American history after their relocation west of the Mississippi. Bringing things forward to the end of the Indian Wars presented the same problem. I knew I didn’t want to try to cover everything up to the present day, but I didn’t want to turn it into a syllabus for an early American course that happened to focus on Indians, either. I finally settled on a rough cutoff date of ca. 1850. It moved things past removal a bit, but without getting bogged down in all the tumultuous events that happened in the late nineteenth century.

With my end point in hand, I began accumulating a small pile of possible books to assign. I wanted to avoid the mistake of geographical limitation I’d made with my first proposed reading list, but I also needed books accessible enough to assign to undergrads. Here are the selections that ended up on the final syllabus I submitted to my professor:

First Americans: A History of Native Peoples, Volume I by Kenneth W. Townsend and Mark A. Nicholas. Whenever possible, I like to have a main text around which to organize a class. This book seems to hit a lot of the important sub-topics, and it’s concise enough to allow for plenty of supplementary readings. Luckily, the first volume also ends at the exact same cutoff date I’d chosen for my course. (Well, to be honest, the fact that this volume ends in 1850 played no small role in my decision to use that date as my end point.) I therefore decided to use First Americans for coverage of the material and then set about looking for monographs and shorter readings for “uncoverage” of important issues.

What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680? edited by David J. Weber. One of the biggest problems I ran into was a shortage of accessible, concise books on the early Southwest. This collection of essays filled a geographic void, and I also liked the idea of a collection of essays by different historians debating the cause of an important historical event. I made this book the basis of a writing exercise designed to get my hypothetical students to consider history as an active process of answering questions and weighing contested explanations.

Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America by Daniel K. Richter. After whittling down my list of books on the early history of eastern North America, this outstanding book was the last one standing. Richter takes the conventional narrative of early American history and flips it around, keeping Indians at the center of the story. It’s a great read, and it engages so many important topics that this one text effectively replaced three or four of the books I had on my preliminary list.

The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent by Kathleen DuVal. Here is where trying to create an “Indian-centric” course with its own geographical perspective came into play. DuVal looks at the American interior before its penetration by Anglophone settlers, showing how there were places where Indians maintained control of the terms of contact and exchange well after the arrival of Europeans. If you want a corrective to the notion that Indians had to retreat ceaselessly before the vanguard of colonization after 1492, this book will do the trick.

Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 by Theda Perdue. I had this book on the list from the get-go, and it stayed there. Perdue covers Cherokee acculturation and change over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, demonstrates why these processes had a unique impact on women’s roles and prerogatives, and does it all in a very concise and readable manner.

I supplemented these books with additional short readings: primary sources, excerpts, and scholarly articles. First Americans is pretty skimpy on pre-Columbian material, so I included some chapters of Alice Beck Kehoe’s America Before the European Invasions on the Paleo-Indian and Archaic periods. I also incorporated some of the primary source selections from Colin Calloway’s First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History, a few doses of ethnographic observation from Coronado and John Smith, some other short secondary readings, a viewing of the Trail of Tears episode of We Shall Remain, and a trip to the McClung Museum’s excellent exhibit on Native Americans in Tennessee.

Looking back on the finished product, I was surprised at how different it was from my first sketchy outlines. It ended up taking a much wider geographic perspective, incorporating a lot of new ideas, and leaving out a lot of material on Indian-colonist relations that I’d planned to use. But I think the final version was a significant improvement.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to use this syllabus in a course of my own, but the assignment made me stretch some historical muscles I’d never used, and it was a heck of a lot of fun.

This semester I’m taking a course called “America and the World since 1865,” which looks at the U.S. from a transnational perspective, its influence on the rest of the globe, and vice versa. For our first meeting, the professor asked us for a very brief reflection on whether our own historical thinking has been contained within national borders, or if we’re used to thinking of history in broader, more international terms.

For the most part, my historical thinking has been confined within national boundaries. As an aspiring early Americanist, my reading and research has generally focused on the U.S. itself. My undergraduate advisor was interested in Peter Kolchin’s comparative work on American slavery and Russian serfdom, and it struck me at that time as a very novel way to approach historical questions, but the U.S. as a sort of discrete unit of study is something I’ve generally taken for granted. The only real exception has been the work I’ve read by colonial American specialists operating from an Atlantic perspective and colonial historians writing about the borderlands between the different European colonial societies. I haven’t really incorporated these insights into thinking about my own research interests, which involve the American Revolution on the frontier. I’m certainly not hostile to a more international approach; I simply haven’t thought much about it.

This neglect has carried over into my teaching. As an adjunct, I’ve tried to incorporate some insights from world history into my U.S. survey courses, but this has been limited to the predictable topics—nineteenth-century imperialism, for example, or America’s role in the World Wars. Of course, American survey courses generally concentrate more on the impact of such overseas involvement on the U.S. itself rather than the results of American foreign involvement on the receiving end, and the survey courses I taught were no exception. This “U.S.-centric” approach to teaching about America’s engagement with the world isn’t really true international history, but at least it helped internationalize my thinking a little; teaching the U.S. and world surveys at the same time prompted me to consider how American imperialism of the late 1800s and early 1900s was similar to the European imperialism of the same period.

The upshot of all this is that borders have bound most of my historical activity up to this point, and I suspect this is true of many Americanists. This course will probably be an eye-opener for me, and I hope it will spur me to think a little more broadly about the forces that have shaped human activity.

Dimitri Rotov directs our attention to a series of items on the hazards of a graduate education in the humanities. The specific problem is the scarcity of lucrative positions relative to the number of people who want them. It’s definitely something to consider.

As someone who’s currently holding two part-time teaching positions instead of a single, higher-salaried full-time one, I know as well as anyone how hard it can be to try to start an academic career. At the same time, though, I think history grads who convince themselves that they’ll never land a decent job are missing an important point.

The next time somebody tells you that there aren’t enough jobs, find out what they mean. If their point is that there aren’t that many tenure-track openings at research universities that confer terminal degrees…well, what else is new? Such a job isn’t the only possible outcome for someone with a history degree.

I know, I know—nobody wants to pull 40+ hours (at minimum) at a museum or documentary project when they can teach four classes a semester and have the summers off, with the balance of their time devoted to whatever research they darn well please. But I think one of the reasons history grads are so desperate about the job market is because they limit themselves.

My career in history has been short, but I’ve sampled quite a bit of what the discipline offers. Let me take this opportunity to assure any students who might be reading this that historical work outside the academy is not only fulfilling, but a genuine privilege and an occasional blast.

Don’t get me wrong; being a college instructor has its perks. But it’s also a trade-off. I miss the days when I could step into the vault and do my research in the original documents, instead of chasing down edited transcripts. I miss holding in my (properly gloved!) hands the cane Lincoln carried to Ford’s Theater, the captain’s speaking trumpet from the Monitor, Mary Todd’s china, Lee’s personal correspondence, Sherman’s handwritten report from Bull Run, an order jotted down by Grant at Appomattox.

Rather than complaining that departments don’t explain how poor the job market is, I would complain that they don’t make students aware of the range of possibilities open to them. By assuming that every successful student should aspire to an academic career, they limit graduates’ prospects and therefore do them a disservice.

Departments should encourage students who are interested in a career outside of higher ed. They should provide them with information about job openings and access to people in their field who can provide advice. They should direct them to internships where they can try different types of historical work for themselves. (An annual panel discussion on historical careers, with representatives from museums, secondary ed, and so on might be worth trying, too.)

Furthermore, and not least importantly, professors should watch what they say around students. Casual remarks about non-academic history careers can stifle any interest in these valuable and important jobs that a student might have had, and will rightly offend those students who entered the program to pursue these paths.

Students, meanwhile, should broaden their vision of the profession—and should examine their reasons for entering a graduate program in the first place. If you’re attracted by the notion of intellectual respectability, three months of freedom, and a nice diploma, then by all means bail out now. If, on the other hand, you passionately love history and can’t imagine doing anything else, then be aware that historians aren’t found only in university classrooms. There are far easier ways to secure wealth and renown than the long, tortuous process of a graduate education in history.